Distributed Situation Awareness: Theory, Measurement and Application to Teamwork

Situation awareness (SA) refers to an operator's up-to-the-minute understanding of 'what is going on'. Over the past two decades, the construct has become a fundamental theme within the areas of system design and evaluation and has received considerable attention from the human factors (HF) research community. Despite this, there is still considerable debate over what SA actually is, how operators best achieve it and how SA achievement and maintenance can be supported in complex sociotechnical systems through system and interface design and network configuration.A more recent theme to emerge within the area is the concept of systemic or distributed SA (DSA), which argues that SA exists at a systems level and that the SA of a system is distributed throughout the agents (people) and artefacts (e.g. computers, tools, procedures etc) comprising the system in question. This book aims to present and validate, via case studies, a novel theory of DSA in complex sociotechnical systems.Situation Awareness in Command and Control presents an exhaustive review and evaluation of contemporary theoretical perspectives on SA and of a range of SA measurement approaches. A novel theory of DSA in complex sociotechnical systems is presented, followed by an original methodology for assessing SA and DSA in command and control environments.The book dedicates several chapters to naturalistic case studies of command and control scenarios undertaken in numerous military domains, as well as one looking at high-consequence civilian domains, designed to validate the DSA model and measurement approach. In closing, the book presents a comparison of DSA in the military and civilian domains, conclusions on SA and DSA in command and control environments, and a series of guidelines designed to assist the design of command and control systems that will aid the acquisition and maintenance of SA and DSA during distributed, collaborative activity.